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1. JOURNAL OF
INTERDISCIPLINARY
HISTORY OF IDEAS
2017
Volume 6 Issue 11
Item 4
– Section 2: Articles –
From Literature to Politics
How Rousseau Has Come to Symbolize Totalitarianism
by
Christophe Salvat
c b a

2. JIHI 2017
Volume 6 Issue 11
Section 1: Editorials
1. Editorial (M. Albertone, E. Pasini)
Section 2: Articles
2. Le théâtre en révolution. Jeux et enjeux juridiques et poli-
tiques 1789–1799 (J. Ruffier-Méray)
3. The Non-Orientability of the Mechanical in Thomas Car-
lyle’s Early Essays (A. Pannese)
4. From Literature to Politics: how Rousseau Has Come to
Symbolize Totalitarianism (C. Salvat)
Section 3: Notes
5. Interpréter les faits. Dialogue entre histoire et droit (M. Al-
bertone, M. Troper)
Section 4: Reviews
5. Book Reviews and Notices (P.D. Omodeo, G. Vissio)
Section 5: News & Notices
6. Activities of the GISI | Les activités du GISI (2017)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3. From Literature to Politics
How Rousseau Has Come to Symbolize Totalitarianism
Christophe Salvat *
It was widely believed after WW2 that totalitarianism could be traced back to
Rousseau’s rationalistic utopia. This idea conveyed, in particular, by Berlin’s Two
Concepts of Liberty and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, is still popular in some politi-
cal circles. This article intends, however, to demonstrate that rather than originat-
ing from Kantian readings of the Social Contract, the totalitarian interpretations
of Rousseau’s work essentially arose from his literary and autobiographical writ-
ings. It is Romanticism, and its alleged political and moral deviances, that is indeed
targeted through Rousseau. Ironically, this prompted some intellectuals—including
Cassirer—to revisit and to reappraise his political thought.
1. Introduction
In this article I propose to uncover some of the now forgotten and mainly ad-
verse readings of which Rousseau was the object during the first half of the 20ᵗʰ
century. There are, I believe, good reasons to rescue these works from oblivion,
whatever their academic standard. It is first always worth remembering that we
do not read Rousseau today as he has always been (or will be) read, and that
there is no a priori reason to think that our interpretation is intrinsically better
than past ones. Each publication on Rousseau, moreover, is a testimony of the
intellectual and political context in which it has been written. In this respect,
all readings of a classical author—however eccentric they might appear today—
should be treated as intellectual archives. There is more, therefore, in studying
Rousseau’s historiography, than just comparing interpretations of his work. In
the present case, it is not in order to defend a Romantic or totalitarian inter-
pretation of Rousseau that I embark in this review of literature of the interwar
* École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (christophe.salvat @ ens-lyon.fr).
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 6(2017), 11, p. 4:1–4:23. Peer-reviewed.

4. period. I shall argue, on the contrary, that Rousseau had often been a pretext
to take a stand on totalitarianism because he then embodied a declining polit-
ical Romanticism. Unlike Hayek, Berlin or Popper, who notoriously identified
totalitarianism with rationalism, the great majority of political commentators
interwar indeed considered Romanticism—and its ‘passive’ individualism—as
the main threat to freedom.
Before endeavouring to unravel the intricate relations between Rousseau’s
historiography and interwar politics, I present Romanticism (or ‘Rousseauism’,
as they called it) as it was regarded at the beginning of the century (section
2). The following section specifically deals with the political arguments raised
against Rousseau’s Romanticism in the 1930s and 1940s (section 3). A politi-
cally and morally conservative audience then accuses Rousseau of destroying
society’s traditional bonds in favour of a democratic and liberal individualism
that—they believe—is but the other face of the new phenomenon called totalitar-
ianism (section 4). While a group of commentators strive to reassess Rousseau’s
political thought around the Social Contract, a new generation of liberal thinkers
(including Hayek, Popper and Berlin) move away from Rousseau and his ‘social-
istic’ politics they believe will lead to a new kind of totalitarianism (section 5).
2. Romanticism and Rousseauism
The notion of Romanticism is very difficult to define. It can either refer to
a literary movement, a political doctrine, or an ideology. It can be “simultane-
ously (or alternately) revolutionary and counterrevolutionary, individualistic
and communitarian, cosmopolitan and nationalistic, realist and fantastic, ret-
rograde and utopian, rebellious and melancholic, democratic and aristocratic,
activist and contemplative, republican and monarchist, red and white, mystical
and sensual” (Löwy and Sayre 2001, 1). Etymologically speaking, the adjective
4 : 2 Christophe Salvat

5. ‘romantic’ describes behaviours, feelings or values—such as chivalry or exalted
sentiments— that are better suited to character of novels (or romans) than to
real persons. The term ‘Romanticism’ is usually attributed to Friedrich Schlegel
who used it in the beginning of the 19ᵗʰ-century to describe the German liter-
ary movement now known as German Romanticism. It has then been applied to
literary and philosophical movements in France and England (Löwy and Sayre
2001, 42-43). The ambivalence of the notion is such that a number of authors
prefer avoiding it altogether. Despite its polysemy, Michael Löwy and Robert
Sayre argue that all meanings of Romanticism share a common opposition to
modernity. In this paper, I want to argue that—with Rousseau—such is not al-
ways the case.
Although Rousseau lived and published a couple of decades before the emer-
gence of the movement, he is considered by its disciples and opponents alike
as one of its main figures. The present paper essentially deals with early 20ᵗʰ-
century and adverse readings of Rousseau. The movement declined at the end of
the century under the philosophical and literary influences of positivism and
naturalism. The 1870 war between France and Germany also contributed to
the disrepute of Romanticism, then widely perceived as a Germanic movement.
In France, at the beginning of the 20ᵗʰ century, Rousseauism was but another
name for contemporary Romanticism or ‘mystical naturalism’ (Seillière 1934,
Dominique 1923, Seillière 1921, 1908, 1918). The first and probably the most
important charge against Romanticism and Rousseau (both of which are to be-
come inseparable) was launched by the Frenchman Pierre Lasserre in 1907. In
his landmark study on Romanticism, Lasserre started by establishing an iden-
tity between Romanticism and Rousseauism:
Rousseau is not a precursor of Romanticism. He is full Romanticism. No theory, no sys-
tem, no kind of sensibility will claim or receive the Romantic status had they not been
recommended or authorized by his work. I do not see anything either in the conceptions,
the passions and the imaginations that are subject to his eloquence that could be denied
by the Romantic character. There is nothing in Romanticism that is not in Rousseau.
There is nothing in Rousseau that is not Romantic. (Lasserre 1907, 14-15)
Amongst prominent early 20ᵗʰ century writers, who have loosely been termed
‘Romantic’, one finds D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann
From Literature to Politics 4 : 3

6. or James Joyce, some of whom have been directly compared to Rousseau¹. For
Lecigne, for instance, who writes in 1909, the best proof that Romanticism is
not dead yet is that “we are still Romantic to the core. Romanticism dominates
in life and in French politics” (Lecigne 1909, 10). The topicality of Rousseau,
during the interwar period, is confirmed by the Nobel Laureate, Franҫois Mau-
riac: “Did he [Rousseau] suspect that with [his birth] he started to poison the
world? It took a century and a half for the poison to take effect: only today can
one observe its final effects” (Mauriac 1930, 75); Rousseau is not dead, “he is one
of us”, continues Mauriac, “he is called Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, André
Gide” (Mauriac 1930, 93).
Bertrand Russell sees the revival of Romanticism as a desperate attempt to
return to medieval obscurantism and to escape from modernity, technology and
rationalism. But, if the opposition to rationalism has arguably been a character-
istic feature of Romanticism in its early stages, then it can hardly be generalised
to Romanticism as a whole. Of German inspiration, the anti-rationalist version
of Romanticism, the so-called Sturm und Drang, bears almost no similarity with
its latest developments. Anti-rationalism is thus not the defining feature of Ro-
manticism².
The Frenchman Ernest Seillière and the American Irving Babbitt strongly
contest the political (as well as the moral) influence of romanticism on modern
societies. They contest Romanticism as an extreme reaction to positivism, but,
unlike Russell, are equally defiant of positivism. Babbitt and Seillière are the
main representatives of a small movement inspired by humanism, and some-
times called New Humanism, which considers imagination as the only way
to truth. For Babbitt, positivism and Romanticism haven fallen into the same
trap, naturalism, and are consequently both responsible for the society’s cur-
rent predicament³. By overstating the power of reason and experience, posi-
¹ D.H. Lawrence, for instance, had been referred to on several occasions, as a ‘modern Rousseau’
(Aynard 1936, Seillière 1936, Soames 1932) He did not particularly appreciate the comparison be-
tween himself and Rousseau (Ulmer 1977).
² Lovejoy argues that Romanticism opposes rationalism when it contravenes to what he calls di-
versitarianism, the Romantic ideal of diversity (Eigentümlichkeit) (Lovejoy 1941).
³ The New Humanists’ criticisms are not, however, symmetrically channelled between positivists
and Romanticists. They actually are almost exclusively devoted to Romanticism, which constituted
the current threat in their eyes, and towards what they consider to be its main representative,
4 : 4 Christophe Salvat

7. tivism pushed imagination into the background and hence prompted a fierce
and overpowering reaction of (neo)-Romanticism. Romanticism, in its turn, to-
tally dismissed reason in favour of emotions, and therefore lost touch with re-
ality. This has had terrible political consequences:
Rousseau says that he founded “an indomitable spirit of liberty” on an “indolence that is
beyond belief”. True liberty, it is hardly necessary to say, cannot be founded on indolence;
it is something that must be won by high-handed struggle, a struggle that takes place
primarily in oneself and not in the outer world. Possibly the ultimate distinction between
the true and the false liberal, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that between the spiritual
athlete and the cosmic loafer. If true liberty is to survive, it is important that ethical
idling should not usurp the credit due only to ethical effort. This usurpation takes place
if we accept the programme of those who would substitute expansive emotion for the
activity of the higher will. In the real world, as I have tried to show, the results of an
expansion of this kind are not fraternal but imperialistic. (Babbitt 1924, 222-23)
Neither positivism nor Romanticism, for Babbitt, adequately dealt with the
role of imagination, which when rightly used, considerably improves our in-
sight on the world. Neo-romanticism is, according to the New Humanists, the
principal factor in the moral and political decline of modern societies. Because
they trusted entirely human nature (see, for instance, Rousseau’s idea of the
good savage), Romanticists have sanctified instinct and spontaneity to the detri-
ment of morality. Men, say the humanists, need moral rules to exercise a control
over themselves, and those rules are not to be invented or discovered through
reason alone. Romanticists were right to reassess the status of reason and expe-
rience in ethics, but—and this is arguably the reason for which the New Human-
ists are so openly critical against them—they misled people by suggesting that
they would incarnate a sound alternative to positivism. Instead of this, argue
Lasserre, Seillière and Babbitt, they merely took the place of it.
The stark opposition introduced by the New Humanists between Romanti-
cism and rationalism is, however, somewhat overestimated. Romanticism can-
not be entirely appraised on the basis of the Sturm and Drang movement. Carl
Schmitt already pointed out in his 1919 Politische Romantik (translated in 1928
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Babbitt 1919, Seillière 1921, Babbitt 1924, More 1913, Babbitt 1910, Lasserre
1907)
From Literature to Politics 4 : 5

8. into French) that the Romantics do not exclude reason and rationalism from
their discourse. On the contrary, the discourse of reason often has the purpose
of concealing the Romantic essence of their thought. The didactic style and the
rational method of the Social Contract, in particular, are a good illustration of
this. The less a system is founded in rationality, the more it tends to claim to fol-
low reason, in order to ground its legitimacy. Isaiah Berlin says little else when,
in 1952, he criticizes Rousseau for the rationalist tricks he uses to deceive and
to cast a spell over his readers:
In theory Rousseau speaks like any other eighteenth-century philosophe, and says: “We
must employ our reason”. He uses deductive reasoning, sometimes very cogent, very
lucid and extremely well-expressed, for reaching his conclusions. But in reality what
happens is that this deductive reasoning is like a strait-jacket of logic which he claps
upon the inner, burning, almost lunatic vision within; it is this extraordinary combina-
tion of the insane inner vision with the cold rigorous strait-jacket of a kind of Calvinist
logic which really gives his prose its powerful enchantment and its hypnotic effect. You
appear to be reading logical argument which distinguishes between concepts and draws
conclusions in a valid manner from premises, when all the time something violent is be-
ing said to you. A vision is being imposed on you; somebody is trying to dominate you
by means of a very coherent, although a very deranged, vision of life, to bind a spell, not
to argue, despite the cool and collected way in which he appears to be talking. (Berlin
2003a, 43).
3. Political Romanticism
Romanticism is not per se a political movement. It is essentially an aesthetic
movement. Most of the Romanticists came to Romanticism by aesthetic rather
than ideological choice. As noticed by Cassirer “in this field [politics] the Ro-
mantic writers never developed a clear and coherent theory; nor were they
consistent in their practice” (Cassirer 1946, 180). The movement is composed
of a variety of intellectual and artists coming from different backgrounds and
of different political persuasions (if they have any), from fascism to liberalism
4 : 6 Christophe Salvat

9. and conservatism¹. “They never meant to politicize” continues Cassirer, “but to
‘poeticize’ the world” (Cassirer 1946, 184).
Not being politically committed does not, however, necessarily lessen the
political significance of the movement. Despite its aesthetic perspective of the
world, Romanticism never ceased to be political. Firstly, Romanticism is not po-
litical in the sense that it is a politically identifiable doctrine but, in the sense
that it profoundly affects the political structure of the society. For Russell, be-
hind the apparent aloofness of the Romantics looms a genuine and most dan-
gerous thirst for power:
The irrationalists of our time aim, not at salvation, but at power. They thus develop an
ethic which is opposed to that of Christianity and of Buddhism; and through their lust
of dominion they are of necessity involved in politics. Their geneaology among writ-
ers is Fichte, Carlyle, Mazzini, Nietzsche—with supporters such as Treitschke, Rudyard
Kipling, Houston Chamberlain, and Bergson. […] The founders of the school of thought
out of which Fascism has grown all have certain common characteristics. They seek
the good in will rather in feeling or cognition; they value power more than happiness;
they prefer force to argument, war to peace, aristocracy to democracy, propaganda to
scientific impartiality. (Russell 2004, 59)
Secondly, political indifference is not paramount to political neutrality. When
totalitarianism is looming, indifference is often conflated with passive consent
to it (Orwell 2002, 415). The Romantic attitude is widely seen as dismissing the
present, giving up hope for the future and sinking into pessimism (Lowy and
Sayre 2001). Although difficult to define, or even to set as a homogenous group,
¹ Löwy and Sayre count six types of romanticism: the restitutionist, the conservative, the fascistic,
the resigned, the reformist and the revolutionary/utopian which can be subdivided into five ten-
dencies (the Jacobin/democratic, the populist, the utopian/humanist/socialist, the libertarian and
the Marxist). The authors admit, however, that this typology is not exhaustive. Maistre and Bonald,
for instance, “seem to be located in a transitional zone” (Lowy and Sayre 2001, 64).
From Literature to Politics 4 : 7

10. the Romanticists seem to converge—or at least are considered to converge—on
one particular point: their negative attitude towards modernity and progress.
They [Orwell mentions Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Huxley, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis] don’t
any longer believe that progress happens or that it ought to happen, they don’t any
longer believe that men are getting better by having lower mortality rates, more effective
birth control, better plumbing, more aeroplanes and faster motorcars. Nearly of all them
are homesick for the remote past, or some period of the past, from D.H. Lawrence’s
ancient Etruscans onwards. (Orwell 2002, 415)
Although often resented for jeopardizing the classical and Cartesian cul-
ture of Europe (and especially France), the philosophical or aesthetic stance of
Romanticism is rather secondary in its popular rejection. Romanticism essen-
tially represents, for its detractors, an intellectual and moral decline of modern
societies. Romanticism is “originally a disease”, asserts Lasserre as if echoing
Goethe (Lasserre 1907, 18). For the Baron Seillière, supported by the scientific
publications of Dr. Pierre Janet, then Professor at the illustrious Collège de
France, Romanticism is the symptom of a “morbid psychological depression”
which itself expresses the frustration of the will to power, to which he also
refers to as “the essential and primordial imperialism of being” (Seillière 1921,
152).
The populist campaign against Romanticism essentially relies on attacks against
the character of Rousseau, rather than against his theoretical work. It is easy in-
deed to criticise Rousseau. In the Confessions, he “reviewed his life with infinite
detail and infinite care, starting it anew with the keenest pleasure” (Charpentier
1931, 273). Even those who most admire him as a writer cannot but condemn his
immorality: “The personality of Rousseau”, writes, for instance, his biographer
Count Morley, “has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It has deservedly fared
ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those who have judged him,
and there is none in the history of famous men and our spiritual fathers that
begat us, who makes more constant demands on the patience or pity of those
who study his life” (Morley 1923, 4). Wyndham Lewis even compares Hitler’s
character favourably to Rousseau’s:
Hitler is the same class of man as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mein Kampf even has some
points of resemblance to Rousseau’s Confessions: in tone here and there, in the loneliness
4 : 8 Christophe Salvat

11. that seems to dog the narrator, or to be natural to him. Also the squalor is the same. There
the resemblance ends. For Hitler’s reticence upon his sexual experiences is as great as
Rousseau’s absence of reticence is exemplary. And then Hitler was never a rogue. If
he borrowed half a crown he would pay it back. Which is more than can be said for
Jean-Jacques. (Wyndham 1939, 77)
These biographical gossips, sometimes supported by self-styled psychologi-
cal studies, are not just anecdotal. They are part of a large political campaign led
against the process of individualisation and secularisation in modern societies
for which Romanticism is held responsible. The insanity of Romanticism, and
by extension of the modern society, is rooted in the insanity of its founder. “Up
to the citizen of Geneva”, declares Mauriac, “murderers recognized themselves
as criminals, libertines did not set an example, sodomites did not teach moral-
ity […]. Jean-Jacques Rousseau can borrow the words of Le Médecin malgré lui:
‘We changed all that’. The heart is on the right, the liver on the left” (Mauriac
1930, 64-67). George Duhamel, member of the Académie Franҫaise, confirms
Rousseau’s lasting and devastating influence: “He is most certainly insane and
it is amazing to think that this sick man is to dictate to minds for a century or
more” (Duhamel 1941, 24).
Now Rousseau is being described as physically and mentally insane. He is in-
sanity incarnate. He is said to have prostate issues, to be an insomniac, impotent
(some suggest he actually never had any children), as well as hyper sensitive,
paranoid, and a storyteller. But, at the time, the most serious and offending
charges were those relating to his sexuality. Rousseau is accused of having had
a pathological taste for masturbation and other sexual perversions, including
masochism, incest (with Mme de Warens) and homosexuality (Laforgue 1939).
In addition to being classed, at the time, as unnatural, those practices illustrate
for his critics the corrupting effects of the romantic effeminacy¹, an effeminacy
¹ Did not Proudhon write a series of portraits of romantic figures (starting with Rousseau’s) which
he unambiguously entitled Les Femmelins [The Weaklings]? Coincidentally enough, the book was
published in 1912, fifty years after the death of its author. In the same vein, Wyndham Lewis, in a
curious chapter of his Hitler’s Cult (1939) in which he compares Mein Kampf to Rousseau’s Con-
fessions, notes that “The present Chancellor is in the habit of threatening suicide; he weeps with
considerable facility, his perorations are shaken with sobs; he storms and raves like a hysterical
prima donna; he is very alive to flattery. Yet he is not homosexual, like so many Germans. It is that
that makes him a puzzle of a man” (Wyndham 1939, 78).
From Literature to Politics 4 : 9

12. Europe had now to pay the price for. Romantic writings, novels and poems in
particular, are considered to primarily address women and young adults. ‘Real’
men are not supposed to enjoy love stories or reveries of solitary walkers, they
prefer international politics and, as it happens, war.
4. Rousseau and Totalitarianism
The campaign led by Babbitt, Lasserre, Mauriac and Seillière immediately
before and after WWI against Romanticism essentially relies, as demonstrated
above, on Rousseau’s personal disrepute. Rousseau then symbolizes the moral
corruption they believed they were witnessing in modern societies: extreme in-
dividualism, immorality, and shallow sentimentalism. These constitute the first
wave of criticisms against neo-Romanticism. At the end of the 1920s, the eco-
nomic and political situations of many countries dramatically deteriorate. The
welfare policies that had been implemented during and after the war are con-
tested by a new generation of liberals opposed to State intervention. Democracy
is increasingly contested in Europe. Italy, Germany and Spain turn to dictator-
ships, whilst England and France are tempted by it. It is on those last two coun-
tries that I would like now to focus my analysis. I shall argue that, in addition to
its morally corruptive effects, Romanticism is then accused of being politically
hazardous, in view of the international situation. Its ‘socialistic’ individualism,
in particular, is viewed by the conservatives (as well as the new generation of
liberals), as a major cause of totalitarianism.
In spite of the critical attitude adopted by many Romantic intellectuals—
including nationals such as Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig—towards the Ger-
man and Italian totalitarian regimes, Romanticism has often been accused of
promoting totalitarian movements. It is true that, either out of political naivety
or personal belief, some Romantics ventured too far in their support for fascism
4 : 10 Christophe Salvat

13. or Nazism (Hamilton 1971). In England, Evelyn Waugh has never been forgiven
for his early support of Mussolini’s campaign in Abyssinia (Sykes 1975, 166). In
France, intellectuals such as Romain Rolland or Bertrand de Jouvenel (both of
whom, incidentally, reedited Rousseau’s Social Contract) have been suspected
of collaborating for defending pacifism or reconciliation between France and
Germany. Romantic intellectuals, although not politically involved—and very
possibly because they were not politically involved—have often been consid-
ered as passive supports of totalitarianism. They paid dearly for preferring the
comfort of an imaginary escape into an idealised past, rather than facing the
atrocities of the real one¹.
During the interwar period, the influence of Romanticism on politics is es-
sentially construed as liberal. Romanticism can first be described as an individ-
ualistic theory. Romanticism is indeed an individualistic movement, even if it
is for metaphysical rather than ideological reasons: for the Romantics, there is
no aesthetic judgment without individual perspective. Individualism is the ulti-
mate Romantic standard: the existence of all things (including political society)
is justified by the satisfaction of individual feelings. For Carl Schmitt, who had
a relatively better coverage in France than anywhere else², bourgeois Romanti-
cism merely consists of ‘subjectified occasionalism’, i.e. the activity of making
every event into an occasion, for expressing and satisfying one’s ego³ (Schmitt
1986, 17; Balakrishan 2000). Romantic individualism is not, however, liberal in
the Hayekian sense of the word. It actually stands for what Hayek referred to
as ‘false individualism’ which “must probably be regarded as a source of mod-
¹ As Zweig eventually admitted in his memoirs, escape (even imaginary escape) was impossible
in a world where information is permanent and omnipresent: “there was no possible evasion, no
retreat […]. There was no country in which to take refuge, no silent solitude to buy; always and
everywhere the hand of fate gripped us to carry us away in its insatiable game” (Zweig 1993, 12).
Zweig did not have any choice other than the ultimate escape, the ultimate withdrawal, the one he
chose to take with his wife one day in February 1942, when they ended their lives.
² Influenced by the work of Pierre Lasserre he approvingly quotes, Political Romanticism is
Schmitt’s only work to be translated into French in the 1920s “having attracted the admiring atten-
tion of those who thought that the Bergsonian élan vital was corrupting the rigorous classical style
of the French mind” (Balakrishan 2000, 27).
³ Michelet’s personal and subjective approach to history is thus characteristic of Romanticism
(Lecigne 1909) Romantic politics, for Schmitt, is “an aesthetically satisfying conversation, a source
of escape, amusement, or even emotional elevation” (Schmitt 1986, xxvii).
From Literature to Politics 4 : 11

14. ern socialism as important as the properly collectivist theories” (Hayek 1949,
4). Romantic individualism is characterized by two features that the new gener-
ation of liberals will starkly reject: its commitment to political community and
social equality (Gamble 1996, 28)¹.
In spite of being entrenched in individualism, the political ideal of Romanti-
cism is the community (Gemeinschaft)—in opposition to society (Gesellschaft)—,
and more specifically, a community turned towards the past (the Middle Ages,
Ancient Greece or the Etruscans), and characterised by a natural, social or po-
litical unity (family, tribe, city). Rousseau’s social contract is not designed to
annihilate individuality but to mediate individual interactions through the po-
litical community. Romantic individualism is thus not opposed to nationalism²,
rather they go hand in hand. In his Romantic interpretation of Rousseau’s So-
cial Contract, Bertrand de Jouvenel referred to this mediation as an “emotive
contract” (Jouvenel 1947).
Within these ‘natural’ communities, there is a complete identification be-
tween the individual and the collective self, or to borrow Rousseau’s terminol-
ogy between the particular and the general will. The closed domestic economy
of La Nouvelle Héloïse is hence considered as a model for all totalitarian utopias³.
¹ This form of liberalism, ironically called ‘New Toryism’ by Spencer, and which is perhaps best
theorized by T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse, had fallen out of favour since the end of WWI. In his
“Present State of the Social Question in England” (1922), Elie Halévy notes how much liberalism
has conceded to war in France like in England. “When peace came”, he explains, “the state was
monopolizing the nation’s commerce; it decided what exports and imports could be allowed; it
restricted civil consumption; it operated all the coal mines; it ran all the railways and the entire
merchant fleet; it manufactured and controlled all the industries that affected the conduct of the
war in any degree” (Halévy 1967, 141). The economic crisis of 1929 and a second war accelerated
the trend. Romantic ideas of liberty and individualism were being subjected to scrutiny by a new
generation of liberals.
² The emotional structure of political communities contributes to what is sometimes thought to be
a political feature of Romanticism: nationalism. Unlike patriotism, nationalism expresses a personal
and unrestrained emotion for one’s country. Alfred Cobban refers to it as a ‘political emotion’,
which he believes to be a modern political outcome of Romanticism: “The second peculiarity of
modern war”, he contends, “is that it does not normally arise out of a conflict of interests, but from
the violent eruption of emotional forces—particularly the strongest political emotion known to the
modern world, that of nationalism” (Cobban 1941, 31).
³ See, for instance, Lester Crocker who publishes in the 1960s a series of studies of the Nouvelle
Héloïse that he strikingly compares to three ‘other’ totalitarian utopias, Huxley’s Brave New World
(1932), Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) (Crocker 1963-65, 1965, 1968).
4 : 12 Christophe Salvat

15. For the American sociologist Robert Nisbet, author of an important article in
1943, entitled Rousseau and Totalitarianism, this destruction of the traditional
bonds of society in favour of a one-to-one relationship between individuals
and the State is at the very heart of totalitarianism. “The totalitarian order”, ex-
plains Nisbet, “is unique in modern history in that it first blurs, then obliterates
the distinction between society and state; it is the state of the undifferentiated
mass; undifferentiated, that is, in any except the political sense” (Nisbet 1943,
96). According to Nisbet, Rousseau’s Romantic philosophy is encapsulated in
the opposition between the State and the society: all his works help to under-
mine the traditional structures of society, including and “perhaps above all” the
Confessions. “The splendidness of isolation from society”, explains Nisbet, “is a
leitmotiv which recurs again and again in the passages of that work. […] It is
not the political state which inspires Rousseau’s hostility, but the harshness,
inequalities, and dissentions of civil society” (Nisbet 1943, 98).
The association between Rousseau and totalitarianism was first drawn by
the nationalist (often royalist) partisans of the French extreme right. Perhaps
because it was easier than explicitly accusing living thinkers, they primarily
targeted Rousseau¹, and encouraged their readers to speculate who his follow-
ers were. The first reference to Rousseau as a totalitarian seemingly dates from
1934 and is to be found in a book entitled L’Europe Tragique written by the
nationalist, catholic author Gonzague de Reynold (Pellerin 2009, 129). During
the following decades, a number of abusive articles regularly flooded the daily
newspaper L’Action Franҫaise bearing the signatures of Charles Maurras, Léon
Daudet or Franҫois Regel: Rousseau and his ‘descendants’ are accused of be-
ing an outgrowth of the German culture, of being responsible for the German
¹ Rousseau has not been the only past political thinker to be held responsible for totalitarianism
at the time. Thomas Carlyle has also been subject to similar attacks. See Grierson 1933, Seillière
1939. Cassirer strongly contested this view: “The modern defenders of fascism did not fail to see
their opportunity here and they could easily turn Carlyle’s words into political weapons. But to
charge Carlyle with all the consequences that have been drawn from his theory would be against
all the rules of historical objectivity. In this regard I cannot accept the judgment that I find in
recent literature on the subject. What Carlyle meant by ‘heroism’ or ‘leadership’ was by no means
the same as what we find in our modern theories of fascism” (Cassirer 1946, 216). Isaiah Berlin also
suggested Maistre as one of the main intellectual influence of totalitarianism in “Joseph de Maistre
and the Origins of Fascism”, an article he sent to Journal of the History of Ideas, which was, at the
time, rejected and only published in 1990 (Berlin 2003b, Armenteros and Lebrun 2011).
From Literature to Politics 4 : 13

16. invasion, and of having spawned national-socialism (Pellerin 2009, L’Aminot
1986).
The Citizen of Geneva—L’Aminot comments—fulfilled Maurras’s theory of the four states
hostile to France. He was a foreigner, a franc-maҫon, a protestant and a Jew; he was
above all the father of this democracy that led to anarchy and to the country’s weak-
ening. Since the beginning of the century, there was hardly a week in which an article
in L’Action Franҫaise or a book by a sympathizer did not denounce the father of the
Jacobine madness. (L’Aminot 1986, 473)
In addition to that, Rousseau—and this point is crucial—is still widely con-
sidered to be the spiritual father of the French Revolution. His liberalism is
characterized by democracy, egalitarianism and—above all—State intervention.
His political philosophy spans, according to Lasserre, everything from “sheer
anarchy to destructive egalitarianism” (Lasserre 1907, 67). “In the social order”,
writes Lecigne, “Romanticism is the rehabilitation of rogues, pipe dreams re-
place common sense, literature reeks of anarchy and revolutionary sentimen-
talism, and to find the formula of this new gospel, one need only go back to
Rousseau’s Social Contract” (Lecigne 1909, 67). Strategically, Vichy had thus a
certain interest in acknowledging Rousseau’s spiritual authority and to place its
ideology– then called the National Revolution—under the aegis of the French
Revolution. On January 21ˢᵗ 1942, a socialist and Nazi collaborator named Mar-
cel Déat published on the first page of the newspaper L’Oeuvre an article en-
titled “J.-J. Rousseau totalitaire”— republished in 1944 (Déat 1944)—in which
he endeavoured to restore Rousseau’s image by turning him into a high priest
of the ‘National Revolution’ and a precursor of national-socialism. But there
is more to their praise of Rousseau than just a political strategy. The domes-
tic policies of the Vichy government did not entirely misrepresent Rousseau’s
idea of a national solidarity—in fact, parts of the modern French social security
and pensions system were actually drafted and initiated by the government of
Vichy.
4 : 14 Christophe Salvat

17. 5. Redeeming the Social Contract
In the previous sections, I have endeavoured to show the effects of the politi-
cal context of the 1930s in France and England on the perception of Rousseau. It
then appeared that Rousseau’s predicament was due not to the Social Contract,
which was then completely overshadowed by his literary accomplishment, but
to his Romantic profile. Emile Faguet, considered at the turn of the century as
a leading authority on the French eighteenth-century, thus dismissed the So-
cial Contract as a “youth work, unrelated to his others writings” (Faguet 1910,
333). Jules Lemaître, whose monograph first published in 1907 and reaches its
38ᵗʰ edition in 1921 (Schinz 1941), went even further: “In my opinion the Social
Contract is, with the first Discourse, Rousseau’s most mediocre book. A sen-
tentious one, it is the most chaotic and the most obscure of his works. And it
eventually proved to be the most fatal. This is also the work that least fits his
biography, the work one can best see him not writing” (Lemaître 1939, 249).
Discarding the Social Contract is still a defining feature of the historiography of
Rousseau during the 1940s. Franҫois Mauriac, who wrote in Figaro on May 19ᵗʰ
1942, hence remarks that “Rousseau’s misfortune is that, while the Confessions
and the Rêveries are familiar to us, this is not true for the rest of his work. Would
we read the Social Contract or Emile, we would see that he opposed himself to
the very arguments that were later opposed to him […]. But because we only
read the everlasting work in which he strips himself naked, in which he truly
confides, our assessment of him is tinged with bad temper” (Mauriac 1942). Sim-
ilarly, Robert Derathé regrets six years later that “In France, Rousseau has been
the father of romanticism, hence our propensity to assess his work through Ro-
mantic writers and sensibility. This explains why it is now standard to speak of
Rousseau’s sentimentalism. On that point, custom is so fixed that one despairs
to get back on one’s feet” (Derathé 1948, 181).
The Social Contract nevertheless enjoyed a certain revival in the 1930s and is
reedited in France three times between 1930 and 1945: twice by Beaulavon (in
1931 and 1938, respectively the 4ᵗʰ and 5ᵗʰ editions) and once by Halbwachs in
1943 (Rousseau 1943, 1938, 1931). In parallel with these re-editions, the 1930s
and 1940s are marked by significant attempts to redeem Rousseau’s political
thought from the accusations of totalitarianism. Ironically, it is the Social Con-
tract which is deemed to save Rousseau from these accusations. Amongst the
From Literature to Politics 4 : 15

18. intellectuals who most contributed to the re-evaluation of the Social Contract,
Ernst Cassirer definitely stands out¹. In 1932, Ernest Cassirer published what
was to become one of the most important essays in Rousseauian literature, Das
Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cassirer 1932). The essay is part of a larger
reflection about the unity of Rousseau’s thought, that had been initiated in
1912 by Gustave Lanson (Lanson 1912). Whilst discussing the relations between
Rousseau’s concepts, Cassirer sketches out a groundbreaking pre-Kantian read-
ing of Rousseau’s philosophy, and shifts Rousseau’s moral theory to a new
plane².
What makes Rousseau a precursor of Kant for Cassirer is his stance on the ab-
soluteness of the moral obligation. Though immanent to human nature, moral-
ity is not ‘natural’ or spontaneous to human beings. Cassirer denies the nat-
uralism that is usually associated with Romantic ethics. In Rousseau’s case, in
particular, human nature ought to be construed as an ideal to be achieved rather
than an empirical reality to be surrendered to. The moral standard of human na-
ture is not knowable to men through pure reason but it is accessible to them
through the inner voice of conscience. Cassirer maintains that:
The circle of Rousseau’s theory of feelings is completed only at this point: feeling is
now raised far above passive “impression” and mere sense perception; it has taken into
itself the pure activities of judging, evaluating, and taking a position. And only now
has it achieved its central position in the constellation of psychological capacities. It
no longer appears as a special faculty of the self but rather as its proper source—as the
original power of the self, from which all other powers grow and from which they must
continually take nourishment lest they wither and die. (Cassirer 1954, 112)
¹ Rousseau’s historical influence on Kant was known to Kantian scholars, but it was not yet used to
theoretically reappraise Rousseau’s philosophy (Delbos 1905, 1912). Cassirer also comment on the
relationship in his own intellectual biography of Kant Immanuel Kants Leben und Lehre published
in 1918.
² The Kantian approach adopted by Cassirer should not be misunderstood and conflated with
Cartesian and Malebranchian interpretations of Rousseau (Bréhier 1938, Derathé 1948, Beaulavon
1937). For Cassirer, Rousseau is unquestionably a Romantic. He is actually the father of Romanti-
cism (Cassirer 1954, 85), and it is essentially from the Nouvelle Héloïse that Cassirer draws the core
principles of Rousseau’s philosophy. Unlike the interpretation of the New Humanists, however, the
Nouvelle Héloïse—far from being a mere sentimentalist novel—is seen as a model of willpower over
one’s passions.
4 : 16 Christophe Salvat

19. Because Rousseau’s moral philosophy is ultimately an ethics of freedom and
choice, Cassirer reckons that it is absolutely incompatible with totalitarian-
ism. Few other intellectuals choose—along with Cassirer—to defend Rousseau’s
moral and political within the Romantic paradigm. The English historian Alfred
Cobban is one of them. In Rousseau and the Modern State (published in 1934, re-
published in 1964), Cobban is one the very few to defend Rousseau’s political
thought from a Romantic point of view. Comparing him to Burke (to whom
he also devotes a monograph), Cobban contends that “Rousseau carries into
politics the fundamental ideas of the Romantic movement” (Cobban 1934, 239).
Unlike many, however, Cobban does not link Rousseau to totalitarianism. If
anything, Romanticism exculpates him. In his 1941 study on totalitarianism, The
Crisis of Civilisation, Cobban argues that, because he was Romantic, Rousseau
could not be read as a political reformer, and certainly not as a totalitarian
thinker. According to him, the Social Contract cannot have any practical appli-
cations since “by itself it is no more than an abstract ideal” (Cobban 1941, 64).
The French liberal thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, adopts a similar approach in
his Essai sur la politique de Rousseau published in the 1947 edition of the Social
Contract (Jouvenel 1947). For Jouvenel, Rousseau is not a political reformer:
he is too pessimistic about the present perspectives to even consider a political reform.
It is only as an individual that man can be rescued from his social predicament. And
for this, there is no need to reform institutions. It is rather man’s relationship to the
institutions that need to be changed. Everything, in politics like in ethics, comes down
to human feelings. (Jouvenel 1947, 101)
This includes the Social Contract that Jouvenel characterizes as a ‘romantic’
arrangement. Jouvenel is probably the only founding member of the Mont Pè-
lerin Society¹ to still consider Rousseau as a Romantic and one of the vey few, if
not the only one, to dismiss his totalitarianism. Jouvenel, however, is somewhat
at odds amongst the new liberals, first because he embodies a welfare liberalism
that is no more fashionable after WWII, and secondly because he himself had
to face accusation of sympathy towards the Nazi regime. With him, I believe,
¹ New foundations to liberalism were set, first in 1938 at the occasion of the Lippmann Conference,
and then in 1947 with the inauguration of Hayek’s Mont Pèlerin Society. Liberalism, it was thought,
should return to its basics in order not to convert into socialism.
From Literature to Politics 4 : 17

20. ends the 20ᵗʰ-century Romantic readings of Rousseau. Robert Derathé heralds
a profound change in the way Rousseau was to be read over the next decades.
In his Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau, he proposes a Malebranchian interpreta-
tion of Rousseau, that he elaborates upon two years later (Derathé 1950). The
book immediately became a landmark in Rousseau’s historiography and played
a role similar to the one played by Lasserre forty years earlier: it ensured the
transition between paradigms¹.
6. Conclusion
Due to his iconic revolutionary image, his Romantic individualism and his
‘socialist’ sympathizers, Rousseau represents a reference best avoided after the
war. The new generation of liberals gathered in Mont Pèlerin had just set their
new objectives to liberalism. The danger, as most people then saw it, was no
longer Nazism, but Stalinism. Enlarging totalitarianism to communist regimes
has, naturally, not been without consequences to political theory. It not only
implied a thorough redefinition of the concept of totalitarianism, but also sym-
metrically, of the idea of liberty itself. This, by way of consequence, affected the
history of political ideas: new theoretical concepts always need the comforting
support of intellectual precursors. In the decades that follow the end of WWII,
¹ Derathé is not, however, the first to have filed Rousseau among the rationalist thinkers. In 1945,
Hayek already claims that Rousseau belongs to the French Cartesian tradition and its “rationalist
individualism [which] always tends to develop into the opposite of individualism, namely, socialism
or collectivism” (Hayek 1949, 4). Harrod (1946) criticizes Hayek on this point. Before Hayek, Peter
Drucker (1942, 137-38) claims that totalitarianism arises out of a misleadingly rational liberalism
that can be traced back to Rousseau.
4 : 18 Christophe Salvat

21. Rousseau generally appeared as one of the main theoretician of totalitarianism¹.
The spirit of the time is probably best summed up by Peter Gay, who states in
his introduction to the English edition of Cassirer’s classical study that “the
fashion in fact is to consider Rousseau a totalitarian—a ‘democratic totalitar-
ian’ perhaps, but a totalitarian nevertheless” (Cassirer 1954, 8). Few, however,
went so far as Berlin, who, in his BBC broadcast on the enemies of liberty at the
beginning of the 1950s, declared that Rousseau “is more responsible than any
thinker who ever lived…,[he] was one of the most sinister and most formidable
enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought” (Berlin 2003a, 49)².
The paradigm reversal undertaken by Derathé concealed the ideological evolu-
tion of the liberals behind the continuity in their attacks against Rousseau.
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